I’m trying to figure myself out. I’m human. So, my
consciousness comes prepackaged with a body. A body is an instrument forged in
the fires of evolutionary pressure. The furnace is earth, and we have been smoldering
for millions of years.
My body comes with instincts. I have impulses. To fuck, to
defend, to run, to protect, to be powerful – and these impulses that guided our
dumber ancestors through the jungles and savannas have been redirected by
culture.
In our culture, most people most of the time are
unsatisfied. And it is because we lack meaning. We lack meaning because we live
artificial lives. We don’t hunt our own food. We don’t tend to the earth and
her fruits. We don’t build our shelters. We don’t have a sense of community.
Instead, we have been molded by a cultural story.
We are born into an artificial “community”. Unlike our
ancestors who had 20 or 30 elders to learn from, we are lucky to have two
elders, Mom and Dad. Our infancy unfolds within cubes. We are fed fake food. We
look into screens animating artificial reality.
We aren’t taught to watch the stars and her cycles, or how
to identify and gather herbs, or how to wield a weapon. We are taught how to
sit in more artificial cubes, to memorize and regurgitate semantic information.
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I imagine our cultural conditioning like a stained glass corridor
we walk through, unconscious. The glass is a translucent blue, and the corridor
is under water. Beyond the glass is the pulsating biotechnological ocean that
is the incomprehensible-ness of reality. We only see the ineffable as it is
refracted through our stained glass.
Epiphanies, radical philosophical insight, trauma, and
crisis are all ways the indiscernible breaks through our safe, 90 degreed
perspective. The unfathomable will not be denied.
Having a philosophical orientation to life is like scuba
gear. Instead of waiting for life to strike me with a crisis, I systematically exposed
myself to chemicals that crack the glass. Once I tasted a little bit of what we
were working with, I did my best to use psychology and philosophy to build a
functional enough piece of scuba gear.
I want to share the schematic with anyone interested in
building their own. I think it’s important you do build your own. But I’ve got work
on sharing the information in an enjoyable way. You’ve seen the directions that
came with your dresser, and you threw that shit out.
I want to share my blueprint without you throwing it away.
And I think it’s important. Because all of our corridors are going to shatter
eventually. And the freedom a reliable set of gear can give you in infinitely more
enjoyable than walking through the artificial prison we are conditioned into.